Providing low cost support and display devices for retail consumers has always provided challenges to the manufacturer of such devices. When displaying consumer products for retail distribution, the products must be presented in an attractive, orderly fashion with enough of the product visible to attract customer interest. In addition, suitable support and display devices must be capable of securely retaining product in its appropriate customer-attracting orientation while enabling the consumer to readily remove product from its support device simply and conveniently while not disturbing the display of adjacent products.
There have been many attempts to configure support and display devices for the myriad of products sold by retailers with mixed results. For example, virtually everyone who has shopped in a supermarket environment has seen vertically hanging metal racks containing friction clips for releasably retaining bagged products such as-potato chips and cookies. Although such racks are universally employed, they are not without their own set of drawbacks. For example, the retailer must expend a fair amount of effort in individually securing each bagged product to a separate friction clip generally at the top edge of the sealed bag. Because of the frictional engagement of the clip some bags can inadvertently drop from the rack when a clip has been extensively used and is no longer supplying sufficient friction to keep a bagged product in place. This often times happens when an adjacent product is pulled from the display rack thus disturbing all product hanging from the rack. On the other end of the spectrum, some clips tend to apply excessive frictional engagement to a bagged product making it difficult for a consumer to remove the product from the rack at time of purchase. In extreme situations, a purchaser may tug on a product either dislodging the entire rack from its supporting shelving or may give up and decide not to purchase the product.
In addition to the drawbacks described above, devices for supporting and displaying multiple products for retail sales have been designed without regard to presenting the consumer with a sufficient portion of the product's packaging as to attract the consumer and provide the consumer with enough information to enable one to make an enlightened purchasing decision. When vertically hanging racks with the above-described frictional clips are employed, each hanging bag obscures substantially all of the packaging on the bag which hangs beneath and behind it. Although this is not a particularly important issue when all product hanging on a single rack is of a single type, the problem of product identification and customer attraction become major issues when diverse product is hung and displayed from a single rack.
Finally, up to now, there has been little or no thought given to the integration of a support device to the visual customer-attracting layout of product being displayed for sale. Oftentimes, display racks are designed to retain products for sale where in actual use, some product obscures the packaging of another depriving customers of proper product display and thus inhibiting product sale.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a device for supporting and displaying retailed materials and, particularly, written works which are free from the drawbacks outlined above.
These and further objects will be more readily apparent when considering the following disclosure and appended claims.